Wan-To couldn't help feeling a certain tension during that period. After all, a galaxy is a big place. The one he had chosen had nearly four hundred billion stars, with a well-defined spiral structure—a pretty desirable neighborhood, and how could he be sure that some undesirable element didn't lurk somewhere in it?
But as the reports from his widespread ERPs began to arrive, they all came up empty. As far as he could tell, which was pretty far, every object in this galaxy was simply obeying the dumb natural laws of physics. There were no unwelcome signs of tampering. No unexplained patterns in the photospheres of any of the several billion stars he was able to examine in detail, no radiation coming in to any of his sensors that wasn't explained by the brute force of natural processes.
Wan-To began to relax. He had found a safe new home! Like any ancient mountain man, coming across a verdant Appalachian valley for the first time, he saw that it was his to clear and plant and harvest and own, and he might easily, like one of them, have said, This is the place.
He was secure.
It was only after he was well settled in, with all his sensors deployed and all their reports reassuring, that it occurred to Wan-To to ask the next question:
Secure for what?
Wan-To mused over that question for a long time. He was not religious. The thought of a "religion" had never crossed Wan-To's mind, not once in all the billions of years since he had first become aware that he was alive. Wan-To could not possibly believe in a god, since Wan-To, to all intents and purposes, was the most omnipotent and eternal god he could have imagined.
Nevertheless, there were occasional troubling questions of that sort that passed through Wan-To's vast mind. A human philosopher might have called them theological. The most difficult one—it was hard for Wan-To even to frame it—was whether there was any purpose in his existence.
Naturally, Wan-To was well aware of one overriding purpose of a kind—self-preservation, the one imperative that governed all of Wan-To's plans and actions. Nothing was ever going to change that; but once it occurred to him to ask what he was preserving himself for he could not quite see an answer.
The troubling question kept coming back to him.
Perhaps it was just that Wan-To was passing through what humans called "a mid-life crisis." If so, it had come upon him early. Wan-To wasn't anywhere near middle-aged. He was hardly past the adolescence of his immensely long span of existence, for he wasn't then much more than twelve or fifteen billion years old.
Wan-To didn't spend all his time brooding over the meaning of it all. He had plenty to do. Just investigating every corner of his new galaxy, first to seek possible enemies, finally just to know it, took quite a while—there were, after all, those four hundred billion stars, spread over some trillions of cubic light-years of space. Over a period of a few millions of years he studied the data coming from the Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky pairs he had planted at strategic locations in the arms, in the core, in the halo, everywhere in the galaxy that looked interesting. A lot of it was interesting indeed—coalescing gas clouds heavy with the approaching birth of new stars, supergiants exploding into density waves that impregnated other clouds, black holes, neutron stars … He had seen them all before, of course, but each one was just a little different, and generally intensely interesting.
Then that permanent itch of curiosity that needed always to be scratched drove his investigations farther into space. His galaxy was his own, uncontested; but Wan-To well understood that one little galaxy was very small stuff indeed in the vast scale of the expanding universe.
When he looked out on the distant rest of the universe he could not see that it had changed much in the few billion years of his investigations. There was a certain tendency for the distant blue fuzzies to turn greenish—they were farther away now, and receding relatively faster. And he saw that some of the older galaxies, even a few quite nearby, were beginning to show signs of senile decay. They were shrinking and losing mass—"evaporating" is the word that would have occurred to a human being. Wan-To understood the process very well. When any two stars happened to wander close to each other in their galactic orbits—as was bound to happen, time and again, in eternity—they interacted gravitationally. There was a transfer of kinetic energy. One picked up a little velocity, the other lost some. Statistically, over the long lifetime of a galaxy some of those stars would keep on adding speed and others would lose some—the faster-moving ones would sooner or later be flung clear out of their parent galaxy, while the slower ones would spiral hopelessly down toward collapse in the center, forming mammoth black holes. Such a process didn't happen rapidly—not in a mere few billion years, that was to say.
But Wan-To could see the process going on, and it made him wonder uneasily about his future.
He wished he had someone to talk to about all these things.
He wished, in fact, that he had someone to talk to about anything. He was getting really lonesome.
He brought himself up sharply every time he came to that point in his thinking, because he knew what the perils were of creating company for himself …
But in the long run he could not help himself. He succumbed. It was inevitable. Even Adam hadn't been able to stand the solitude of Eden forever.
Wan-To reminded himself that, whatever else they might be, any new copies of himself first and foremost had to be safe. He wanted no one, ever, sniping at him from ambush again.
So the first playmate he created in his new galaxy was stringently edited, with every character trait that led toward independence of action carefully censored out, and an unswervable devotion to himself tailored in. He omitted all the information that made it possible to use the gravitational forces that could wreck stars; he blotted out the parts that led to such emotions as anger and jealousy and pride. He made the new copy, most of all, content.
His newest copy was only a shadow of himself, really. It wasn't much smarter than his almost forgotten doppel, Matter-Copy Number Five. It didn't have enough personality to deserve a real name. Wan-To called it "Happy."
Happy was certainly happy. Happy took everything in stride. If Wan-To snapped at him, Happy replied with soothing burbles of good-natured sound—you might almost call them "giggles." When Wan-To was in a bad mood, Happy blithely ignored it.
Since one of the things Wan-To wanted from his dream companions was sympathy, he tried again. The new one was as dumb and feckless as Happy, and as impotent to cause trouble, but it was designed to care about Wan-To; he named it "Kind."
Within the next few thousand millennia Wan-To had created for himself a "Funny" and a "Sweet" and a "Sympathetic" and even a "Motherly"—Wan-To didn't call it exactly that, of course, because he had no idea of "mothers"; but if it had been human it would have clucked over him and fretted when he fretted and every day made him chicken soup.
So for a while Wan-To was no longer alone. But they weren't real company. They were idiots.
He was surrounded by a dozen cheerfully babbling children—sweet, obedient, charming …
Stupid.
No matter how much a parent loves his little ones, there comes a time when he wishes they would grow up … and Wan-To realized ruefully that he had made that impossible for his new flock. He was almost tempted to make a few more, with just a trifle more of independence and aggressiveness …